Is there relaly a need for 4th ed Realms changes just for the *mechanics*?

[Silverblade The Ench]

I can accept the Realms needed changed, me I love the 1st grey box, with a far FAR more wild, unexplored, mysterious setting, you know "Forgotten Realms" ?!
And I think they could have done some bits better however , what really bugs me, is the same thing that PO'd me about the "Time of Troubles":

It seems largely to be an excuse to have the mechanics of D&D change and fit the setting.
Note I said "excuse"

Look, I'm a DM (like many of you), to me, the game rules are not that important, actually!
Changing form 1st to 2nd to 3rd to 3.5 to 4th ed over the years...meh big deal, I like how the rules have improved, to my way of thinking with each advance
I play D&D...that's all that matters, I'll use whatever ruleset is the most pleasurable for me to work with.

Now this is my issue:
the rules DO NOT CHANGE THE SETTINGS FOR D&D, NOR SHOULD THEY!!
The "crunch" must follow the "fluff", not the "Crunch" altering the "fluff" to force the setting to fit the mechanics.

goes for any setting or game rules.
Hm?

 

[ggroy]

Was there a reason for the existence of 2E AD&D as we know it?

 

[doctorhook]

Mechanics is a convenient reason for why Magic Missiles can miss now, but why any Wizard who knows it can now cast it all day.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hm?

Yup.

But it's hard to resist the opportunity to do new things with a beloved franchise. And blowing up FR gave them a chance to do a lot of new things with a new game in a way that would guarantee that a lot of people picked it up.

I do think they've mostly learned the lesson from that, though I think the biggest test of how well they've learned it will be Dark Sun. So far, the comments on that have been pretty encouraging.

 

[doctorhook]

Yup.

But it's hard to resist the opportunity to do new things with a beloved franchise. And blowing up FR gave them a chance to do a lot of new things with a new game in a way that would guarantee that a lot of people picked it up.

I do think they've mostly learned the lesson from that, though I think the biggest test of how well they've learned it will be Dark Sun. So far, the comments on that have been pretty encouraging.

Dark Sun is going to be a challenge; it's an old setting that used a lot of "old" thinking about mechanics, especially about what races should be available. Now we know better -- banning races isn't a very inclusive way to game. The trick will be in keeping the numbers of Gnomes and Half-Orcs (and whatever other races aren't currently explained in Dark Sun, such as Tieflings, Dragonborn, Devas, Drow, Genasi, Warforged, Shifters, and so on) to a minimum without banning them entirely.

 

[Belorin]

IMHO, yes however just not as extreme as they did. The changes from 1E to 2E and 3E to 3.5 were mainly superficial, involving mainly minor changes to characters and combat. Level access and limits for the various races and classes and things like AC, thac0 and a deity's power level.
4E took pretty much every aspect of the game and altered how it worked, Forgotten Realms as the now showcase setting needed to change, however there were some major obstacles to this; the Realms well defined history and it's lore-masters, the perceived overabundance of super npcs and deities and the constant flow of canon information via the novels. Some of which appeared to contradict established lore.
The way magic worked was changing and Mystra as the goddess of magic had a stranglehold on it with the Weave, then there was Shar with her corrupt version, the Shadow Weave, with the fundamental changes in the way magic worked something had to give. Now how they did it, I don't condone, with the length of time that they worked on 4E, I could have come up with something less disturbing and many have. But, it killed a few birds with one stone so they ran with it. The Spellplague took care of the rules and the necessary time jump took care of the lore.


Bel

 

[Shroomy]

I think they "blew up" the Realms more for story related reasons then they did for mechanics (overall, this concern was probably a distant second and the biggest mechanical change to affect the Realms were the introduction of the new races, specifically the dragonborn). Its obvious they wanted to get rid of stuff from previous editions that they no longer liked (the real world analogs like Maztica or the Old Empires, the 3e Great Tree cosmology) and that they wanted to jump ahead to keep the really detailed lore in the distant past and give themselve a 100 year cushion for story purposes.

 

[AllisterH]

I think it had to.

Magic is just not as powerful in 4e as it was before. Unless you point out that everyone was doing rituals BEFORE, there needed to be a way to explain why magic was so much weaker than before.

Notice Eberron escaped this mainly because even though magic was as powerful in eberron, the sheer lack of high level spellcasters (level 9+) meant that you could safely ignore it for the most part.

 

[Oni]

I've said this before, but I think I would have preferred that the 4e Forgotten Realms had been a re-imagining with an emphasis on keeping the basic form and feel of previous iterations of the Realms even if some of the details were changed. That is to say that, for instance, I would have been much more accepting of them just saying Dragonborn had always been there, rather than completely altering the face of the campaign world to justify their inclusion. It would have been a good time to clean up the mess that is continuity by distilling the Realms down to its essential history rather than trying to render it void by shoving it into the far past and pushing the timeline way into the fiture. In trying to justify all the changes they've made, rather than just making them they managed to take the Realms and make it something else that really just doesn't spark my imagination like it used to.

 

[doctorhook]

I've said this before, but I think I would have preferred that the 4e Forgotten Realms had been a re-imagining with an emphasis on keeping the basic form and feel of previous iterations of the Realms even if some of the details where changed. That is to say that, for instance, I would have been much more accepting of them just saying Dragonborn had always been there, rather than completely altering the face of the campaign world to justify their inclusion. It would have been a good time to clean up the mess that is continuity by distilling the Realms down to its essential history rather than trying to make it rather than just trying to render it void by shoving it into the far past and pushing the timeline way into the fiture. In trying to justify all the changes they've made, rather than just making them they managed to take the Realms and make them something else that really just doesn't spark my imagination like it used to.

From what you're saying, I'm sort-of imagining a reboot of FR, similar to the recent Star Trek reboot.

I think they were sort of backed into a corner with FR, and ultimately they tried to appease fans by allowing all the previous lore to remain canonical -- this would have been much harder to do with a reboot, so instead they went with a magical calamity and then fast-forwarded 100 years. In theory, it's not a bad idea, but in practice, a lot of people still complained anyway.

Personally, I don't mind 4E's Realms, but then again, I was never much invested in the "old" realms.